passages, besides syllabaries, in which the cuneiform characters were catalogued and explained.  Mathematics were diligently studied, and tables of squares and cubes have come to us from the library of Larsa.  Geography was represented by descriptions of the countries and cities known to the Babylonians, natural history by lists of animals and birds, insects and plants.  The Assyrians were endowed with a keen sense of history, and had invented a system of reckoning time by means of certain officers called limmi, who gave their names to their years of office.  The historical and chronological works of the Assyrian libraries are therefore particularly important.  They have enabled us to restore the chronology of the royal period of Israelitish history, and to supplement the Old Testament narrative with the contemporaneous records of the Assyrian kings.  The Babylonians were less historically exact, perhaps because they had less of the Semitic element in their blood; but they, too, carefully kept the annals of their kings, and took a deep interest in the former history of their country.

Contract and other tablets relating to trade and business formed, however, the larger part of the contents of most Babylonian libraries.  They have revealed to us the inner and social life of the people, so that the age of Khammurabi, or even of Sargon, in Babylonia, is beginning to be as well known to us as the age of Perikles in Greece.  Along with the contract-tablets must be counted the numerous legal documents and records of law-cases which have been preserved.  Babylonian law was, like English law, built upon precedents, and an elaborate and carefully considered code had been formed at an early date.

Collections of letters, partly royal, partly private, were also to be found in the libraries.  The autograph letters of Khammurabi, the Amraphel of Genesis, have come down to us, and we even have letters of his time from a lover to his mistress, and from a tenant to his landlord, whom he begs to reduce his rent.  Boys went to school early, and learning the cuneiform syllabary was a task that demanded no small amount of time and application, especially when it is remembered that in the case of the Semitic Babylonian this involved also acquiring a knowledge of the dead language of Sumer.  One of the exercises of the Sumerian schoolboy bids him “rise like the dawn, if he would excel in the school of the scribes.”

Purely literary texts were numerous, especially poems, though nothing corresponding to the Egyptian novel has been met with.  The epic of Gilgames, composed by Sin-liqi-unnini, has already been referred to.  Its twelve books answered to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and the eleventh accordingly contains the episode of the Deluge.  Gilgames was the son of a royal mother, whose son was fated to slay his grandfather, and who was consequently confined in a tower.  But an eagle carried him to a place of safety, and when he grew up he delivered Erech from its foes,